Search results

<i>Between Structure and Matter: Other Minimal Futures </i>at Aicon Gallery, New York, features the work of eleven artists, of varying generations, from Bangladesh, India, Madagascar, Pakistan, Tunisia, and the UAE. Curated by Murtaza Vali and Prajit Dutta, the exhibition examines the parallels of abstraction and Minimalism by artists from North...

This conversation between <strong>Fawz Kabra</strong> and <strong>Reem F</strong><strong>adda </strong>centres around <em>Not New Now</em>, the sixth Marrakech Biennale. Curated by Fadda, she approaches the term 'contemporary art' critically, opting instead for the notion of 'living art', which, as she explained during the opening, 'comprises art that is now; about the living,...

Marwa Arsanios' practice involves performance, installation, film, animation, and publications. In this interview, Arsanios and Fawz Kabra touch upon several previous projects and connect points of view on feminism, <i>Al-Hilal</i> magazine publications in the 50s–60s, performance, and destroyed bodies and architectures that mark the remnants of violence induced on the...

Youmna Chlala is an artist and writer living and working in New York whose writing, poetry and art weave in and out of installation, video, sculpture, or performance works. Chance plays a key role in Chlala's practice, as she creates situations that are left to coincidence and happenstance, whether it...

Fawz Kabra reviews <i>33rpm and a Few Seconds</i> (2013), a play by Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh which creates a fiction centred around the deaths of two Lebanese activists, performed at New York's Asia Society theatre in April 2014. Devoid of any stage actors, the story develops with a narration...

Personal stories can reveal much about what is to come. History repeats itself in the familiarities we find in other people's tales and the way experiences can move from the particular to the universal. In this essay, Fawz Kabra examines Iman Issa's installation <em>Common Elements</em> (2013), and unpacks a methodological...

More than giving meanings to things, and more than simply a form of communication, language is used as a method of control – a promotional tool for nation (image) building. It is also a vehicle to spread freedom and emancipation from the powers that be: government, religion, school, or parenting....

I am not going to argue for the writing of Derrida, Foucault, Benjamin or Sekula. Instead, I am going to discuss Mustafa, that 'young image entrepreneur, who collected photographs online, to be printed for sale on the streets of Ramallah.' I will discuss Shuruq Harb, who stumbled upon and exposed...

Jacques Rancière argues: Signification as conveyed in art is produced by its surroundings. There is no formula to impose one meaning over another as time, language, social issues, and subjective experiences are some of several factors that constantly reshape meaning. Political signification in artworks or curatorial projects, that are both...

In May 2013, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) organized the fifth edition of World Nomads, a festival presenting the diverse Francophone arts and cultures in New York through extensive programs in visual art, music, and performance. Previous iterations included Africa (2008), Haiti (2009), Lebanon (2010), and Morocco (2011). 2013's...

<em>Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and The New Political</em> by Tarek El-Ariss is a sequence of seven chapters that connect Arabic literary texts from the 1800s to the present day. Through these examples he discusses and critiques the Arab experience in relation to modernity. He does not employ the...

<em>A </em><em>Steady</em><em> Progress of Nothingness, </em>Basim Magdy's most recent solo exhibition, opened on 4th April 2013 at Newman Popiashvili Gallery in New York. The space, transformed into a black box, contained an assemblage of three separate works that operate in concert, bouncing information from one to the other. A video...

On 2nd February 2013, e-flux's exhibition space on Manhattan's East Broadway hosted Khalil Rabah's first solo exhibition in the United States. <em>Khalil Rabah:</em> <em>Pages 7, 8, 9</em> presented the artist's work from the last ten years in a very curious manner. The exhibition was contextualized by a symposium entitled 'Some...

Rasha Salti is a writer and curator of film and visual art. In 2011, she co-curated the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennale and is currently the programmer of African and Middle Eastern Cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival. In this interview, Salti speaks with Fawz Kabra about one...

Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures seem as though they come from another time: a future past, or a parallel time space. Her visceral works can both draw you in by their intricate qualities or else repel you away, due to their imposing size. A scorched cathedral turned on its head so that...

In Hayden White's essay 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', he writes: 'Narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to...